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Omnilert Enhances Emergency Alert Offerings with SMS Inbox

By Kevin Hudson

02/06/13

Omnilert has released an SMS Inbox feature for its e2campus and Amerilert emergency alert systems. The new tool is a cloud-based emergency dialog management feature that organizes incoming responses to emergency alerts in a way intended to help administrators gain better situational awareness to manage an incident.

SMS Inbox will allow students, citizens, first responders, employees, and others using Omnilert emergency alert products to reply to text messages alerts and engage in an ongoing dialogue with emergency response administrators to provide information that may affect the response to an emergency, or make requests for assistance during an emergency, via native text messages.

The feature also allows system administrators to respond to individual recipients via SMS text messages from the SMS Inbox interface and is available to all e2Campus and Amerilert accounts at no additional cost.

The need for this new feature, according to a company release, stems from Omnilert's stated belief that during major incidents communication systems can become overwhelmed and text messaging often proves to be the most effective way, and sometimes the only way, to communicate.

"This is a fantastic addition to e2Campus, and one I can see lots of benefit to," said Gerald Volpe, operations manager for student development at Colby-Sawyer College, in an Omnilert release. "It gives us a way to make it more interactive and gather information when we're using the system for an emergency."

The SMS Inbox feature is now live for all e2Campus and Amerilert clients that currently have the SMS Reply feature active. If clients do not currently have SMS Reply active, or would like to activate SMS Inbox, they may contact their account manager about adding this feature at no cost.